This paper argues that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection offers the tools to break free from the present impasse in order to rebuild philosophy and regain the love of wisdom. Indeed, I want to suggest that evolutionary theory provides the basis for a new, demythologized rationality, and opens the door to the wonder of human imagination.

This paper investigates the future of civilization in terms of its threats and possible solutions. The future of human civilization may enter a stage of crisis in the 2050–2500 years if the known reserves of the strategic resources will be depleted. Even worse, about the year 5000 all potential reserves of the strategic resources will be used up, if the population will grow constantly. The solution, which can prevent this decline, at least at its current pace, is in the development of the Universal Civilization, which should minimize conflicts and trigger dialog within mankind for its good sake. In this approach one can seek the development of wise humans, who will be able to self-sustain their civilization. Otherwise our time is limited and we will not survive our knowledge, which we have been developed so far and may look as a lost time. This grand issue defines the philosophical inquiry—what to do to survive? Has any effort sense, if we know that the Sun will stop heat us and afterwards the Earth will be a dead planet?

This essay combines information on the recent ISUD Sixth World Congress Humanity at the Turning Point: Rethinking Nature, Culture, and Freedom and some reflections inspired by presentations and discussions at the congress. It is focused on the presentation of one of the keynote speakers, Karl-Otto Apel, entitled “Discourse Ethics, Democracy, and International Law: Toward a Globalization of Practical Reason”. Apel argued that the transcendental-pragmatic foundation of morality serves as the ultimate basis for the universal conception of law, e.g., of human rights. It establishes the transcendental basis of the idea of democracy, and at the same time establishes a regulative principle for a possible critique of the democratic states. Apel discussed the question of a political order of law able to represent the idea of human rights. In his approach to it, he referred to Kant’s idea of “a federation of free states” (as opposite to a “world state”) in the solution of the problem of a cosmopolitan system He noticed the tension between two orientations of international law: one towards “human rights” and hence a cosmopolitan law of single citizens and the other towards the sovereignty of single states. He asserted that the universal conception of law cannot be reduced to the legislative autonomy of any state. Consequently, the universal conception of human rights cannot be adequately realized either by particular democratic states or by a world state as a despotic superpower. Apel concluded that an adequate institution for the current debate regarding the issues of global peace and security can only be a federation of nations like the UN, the meta-institution of global discourse and the political representation of international law. At the heart of the essay is Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal and its relevance for today’s discussions about peace and security. Attention is paid to the attempts to rethink Kant by Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, Jaques Derrida, Martha Nussbaum, and David Held, among others. Some of the authors indicate the tension between the sovereignty ofstates and the universality of human rights. Other authors criticize cosmopolitanism as overly unifying in contrast to the socio-cultural diversity of societies. The essay draws a contrast between two tendencies concerning international relations. One is the current neoconservative course toward American domination throughout the world. An alternative to this is the philosophers’ call for “the cosmopolitan model of democracy” and strengthening the network of transnational grass-roots movements and international institutions, including the UN.

In this essay, I will show one way in which Ricoeur utilizes Aristotle’s discussions in Rhetoric and Poetics; I will take my point of departure from his hermeneutic theory of metaphor. Here, he reverses the Aristotelian intention by blending the domains of discourse we call mythos and logos in a way which suggests that the latter is subsumed by the former. While one can argue that the two are co-emergent processes, Ricoeur’s formulation undermines one side of the dialectic between them.

It is obvious that scientific knowledge continues its progress in spite of the limitations placed on it by Kuhn’s paradigm theory, and as we have seen, Kuhn admits this progress and seeks to explain it. Scientific discoveries occur almost weekly as we acquire greater and greater knowledge of the world, society, and ourselves. Yet society does not progress; it stagnates and sometimes regresses. Why is it that the vast knowledge we have accumulated is not extended to the improvement of human societies? Why has this humanistic project of the Enlightenment been abandoned?

Since of much of modern discourse, extending from cognitivism to connectionism to deconstructivism, has been greatly inclined to look at reality in relation to processes where the personal factor plays little if any causal role, the pursuit of wisdom today has become primarily identified with the logos or the pursuit of a rational account of reality and the rule governing principles behind it. Although there is not space enough to traverse all that is involved here, it will be argued in this paper that the secrets of wisdom will never be revealed if its nature is limited to a singular description of just one function of thought. What is needed if the love of wisdom is to be regained is a more dynamic and symmetrical account—one that considers the reconstructive e nature and generative e capabilities of the human mind as well as the flexibility and complexity of thought; one that realizes that the end stages of logos are only the by-product of insight obtained from more personal and emotionally charged meaning; and one that takes seriously the role of mythos in the thinking process.

In this paper I will attempt to show that the next step in acting methodology is to move from psychological cognition to meditative thinking—Logos, giving examples of how that Logos becomes word and is then revealed in the text, play or story—Mythos.

Inspired by Nietzsche’s insistence that we exploit actual history and Foucault’s extrapolation of Nietzsche’s project, my explication of the logic of originary withdrawal is centered around an analysis of an historical account of origin; here, we turn to the image of the original lawgiver, as depicted in the Iroquois foundation narrative, the narrative that serves to constitute their political community. This analysis helps to cultivate an alternative understanding of political necessity by starting with the traces of a material discourse from the past and, more important, about the past rather than starting with theory.

The aim of this essay is to specify the chief concern for post-Marxist political strategy as the discovery or invention of a new political logic. Beginning with Laclau and Mouffe’s influential Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, this essay extends Lyotard’s well-known diagnosis of the status of metanarratives to a consideration of the conditions for political resistance and dissent. Using concepts drawn from the work of Althusser, Nealon, and others, it reworks Laclau and Mouffe’s appropriation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in order to separate it from any foundational, normative political identity. In conclusion, the essay uses Bergson’s discussion of intuition and fabulation in order to begin to articulate the concepts of a democratic politics.

Inverting the sequence of the traditional terms, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence Levinas redefines philosophy as the “wisdom of love”. Through an intertwining of Platonic motifs and Levinasian inspirations, the essay argues for a mutually regulated interplay of mythos and logos as a way to regain a sense of wisdom that remains respectful of the elements of otherness in reality-in particular, respectful of the otherness of the Third who, for Levinas, constitutes the ground for politics. That is, the interplay of mythos and logos results into a mytho-logy in which the logos directing the mythos is the voice of the other which imposes not only the preservation (ethics), but also the institutionalization (politics) of the differences, alterities and incommensurabilities that constitute reality. The consequence of this differently negotiated notion of wisdom is a reconfiguration of philosophy in terms of a mythological politics of bodily, economic testimony in the service of the Third.